Other Lessons

WARNING: In some cases, the Spanish derived word may not be understood by everybody due to the fact that there may be a couple of words with the same meaning.

For example, in the dictionary I saw that the word for socks could be used as either "medyas" or "kalsetin". The former is used quite frequently while the latter is derived from the Spanish word "calcetines". I tried to use the word "kalsetin" because that was a word I was most comfortable with but nobody could understand what I wanted.

I have seen market expressed as merkado or palengke. I have seen church expressed as inglesya or simbahan. I have seen book expressed as libro or aklat. Since I'm not a native Tagalog speaker nor am I a Philippines resident, I cannot begin to explain how and in which circumstances is it proper to use which word. Or even which region, etc...

But because I developed this table based on words that I've heard instead of words that I've seen in a dictionary, I believe these are the most common of spanish-derived Tagalog words.

In addition to this table, the months, the days of the week, and telling time is derived from Spanish. So if you know these words in Spanish then reproduce them and you will know the Tagalog word. The pronounciation for these words are a bit different but the Spanish pronunciation is, for the most part, understandable by most filipinos. The one exception to this is the word for Sunday. It is not domingo as it is in Spanish, it is linggo which also has a dual meaning for "week". As in 3 linggos meaning "three weeks".

Spanish is a commonly spoken language. I read somewhere (when I find the link, I'll try to post it) that the most commonly spoken FIRST language is Spanish. The key word here is "first". Most people learn English but native English speakers are only really born in USA, Canada, UK, South Africa, and Australia. But all of Latin America, many Caribbean countries, and Spain are born speaking Spanish. Although the Indian population is huge, they are split speaking many different languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati. And the Chinese are split speaking Mandarin and Cantonese.